Gilbert Sorrentino - The Moon In Its Flight

9. Boxers are excellent swimmers, which should have alerted their owner to the suspicious nature of these two hapless dogs’ deaths; of course, the soused Sarah had never admitted that she had a problem and therefore never got help.

10. The “haircut” joke was a favorite of saloon comedians, who often and anon told it while soused.

11. “Aporia” is a Greek word that means “who knows?” or, in certain contexts, “what the—?”

A Tomato

1. A gleaming white bicycle at the bottom of a pool is an example of an aporia — but not in real life.

2. Spaghetti alla matarazzo is not for everyone.

3. The author had originally thought to place the gleaming white bicycle in the projection booth of the Jewel Theater, pronounced, at least in this story, “thee ay ter,” as if you didn’t know.

4. The baby carriage trundled home to Mrs. Moskowitz was most probably a stroller.

5. “A thousand drinks are not enough [to pay] for a haircut,” or so says the Albanian proverb.

6. Basil is never used in spaghetti alla matarazzo, save by natives of the Midwest.

7. The Surgeon General has suggested that the Moskowitz curse is, in all probability, secondhand cigarette smoke.

8. The green umbrella by the motel pool is a motif that some wag had once thought of donating to Raymond Carver.

9. “Carver,” in this text, has no relation to the late writer (see above).

10. That the author does not tell us what “tomatoes are cheaper” than may be an instance of a free aporia, or, in the parlance of narratology, an ekphrasis.

11. “Put that in your pipe and smoke it,” he laughed.

He rose and fumbled about in an escritoire until he found the clipping: “They stood in the dark in the driving rain underneath her umbrella.” Can all this have really taken place in America? Obviously, it was abnormal. Maybe not the men, who mostly go out to work, but the women, who are most inclined to talk and who have nothing to do.

He had a good job in advertising and they lived in Kew Gardens in a brick semi-detached house; certainly the reader will recall such shoddy incidents in his own life.

“Welcome to the scene of the extraordinary … outrage!”

Not even fake art or the wearisome tricks of movies can assist them. This was in 1948.

The roar of all the traffic came hurtling in through the wide-open window, the liquid moonlight filling the small parking area outside the gates to the beach. What was the scent of the perfume she wore? Why did he not pick her out of her red plush chair and sit her on his knee? He got up and closed the door, then lay down on the bed with her and took off her jacket and brassiere. Of course it wouldn’t be sordid. He knew that it was impossible, when once the material circumstances of a function were altered, for its aesthetic expression to survive. Different thighs. What is a supper club?

“Above all, the presence of the loved person prevents reflection, and makes us women wish to be overcome.”

“I don’t even know where CCNY is!”

She got up, her breasts quivering slightly, and he saw faint stretch marks running into the shadowy symmetry of her pubic hair.

“I don’t suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or clock.”

“We can go to Maryland and get married,” she said.

“How do you play Mah-Jongg?”

A woman of brilliance and audacity, accompanied by a mere boy, came into the place and took seats near them.

“I want to marry you, I can’t stand it.”

When she slipped her coat off her breasts moved under the crocheted sweater she wore. Perhaps so much assails him that he has to close down ninety percent of himself to phenomena in order not to explode. Her eyes gray, flecked with bronze. She was fair.

We were ashamed of wanting what we wanted, but something had to be done about it all the same.

She was crying and stroking his hair. Was she happy? No answer probably. Against the tabletop her hand, glowing crescent moons over lakes of Prussian blue in evergreen twilights. Of course, life is a conspiracy of defeat, a sophisticated joke, endless, endless. The next moment she felt a violent blow underneath her chin.

Everybody was drinking Cutty Sark. She zipped open his trousers. All night the February wind would come barreling down the wide keyway of Third Avenue, moving right over them all. He felt his heart rattling around in his chest in large jagged pieces. In her fingers a golden chain and on the chain a car key. And so through the agreeable vacation life there twitched one grim vein of tension. What he remembered was her gray cashmere coat swirling around her calves as she turned at the foot of the stairs to smile at him, making the gesture of dialing a phone and pointing at him and then at herself. How could he bear this image? It was just a rotted punctured husk.

One day, in New York, he bought her a silver friendship ring, tiny perfect hearts in bas-relief running around it so that the point of one heart nestled in the cleft of another.

“Let me come and sleep with you.”

“What in the end is most apt to fill me with fever is to leaf through train schedules.”

“Let me lie in your bed and look at you in your beautiful pajamas.”

“I mean it,” she said.

He said that he would change the eating habits of man!

She smiled and asked for another coffee, taking the key and dropping it into her bag. Who can bring them to each other and allow him to enter her? No argument or persuasion could ever induce him to set up a female establishment after the manner of his companions. They were concerned about him. (They didn’t really know him.) He was not yet strong enough to ward off their services, and noted that that brought him into a state of dependence on them which might have evil consequences.

“Help me. I’ll do anything you say.”

“In a little while, love, you will be dead; that is my burden.”

She had white and perfect teeth. Her browned body, delicate hair bleached golden on her thighs. I staggered toward the dresser, and there like a beacon stood the lovely yellow tin. It was a joke after all.

“I’ll hide in the closet and be no trouble.”

“If only I had seen that decree, which had appeared in an inconspicuous place in the five newspapers I read every day, I should not have fallen into the ‘trap.’”

He opened the button of her shorts. “All right.”

At these words, Roberte does not know if it is from shame she trembles because the sentence is carried out, enormous, impetuous, scalding, between her buttocks, or whether it is from pleasure she is sweating.

“If one has … faith … all things will … come! All … right!”

“Think of a repertory of insignificant things, the enormous work which goes into studying them and getting a basic knowledge of them. What is the University of Miami? What does Benedictine cost? I want to rehabilitate this period by writing of it with the names of things most noble.”

“A hot and breathless night toward the end of August, the patriotic smell of hot dogs and French fries in the still air?”

He adored her. She liked it very much that he didn’t look like a blacksmith. Believe me when I say he wanted to kiss her shoes. White lamps, soft lights.

She was childless herself, and she considered herself to be to blame.